Tenacious rise from paddy to partner

The sun is shining on Hop Dang, one of the newest partners at Allens Arthur Robinson.

Although his rise to the partnership followed a route rarely taken by any lawyers at a national Australian firm, his ambition and work ethic will be familiar to many.

Dang grew up in a rural part of Vietnam, where he spent his childhood growing rice and tending buffalo. His English was basic when he moved to Hanoi in 1989, built on what he could pick up from late night broadcasts by the BBC and his brother’s Beatles records. He still remembers a favourite song he learned all the words to.

“The first one – I will never forget – was Here Comes the Sun," he says.

“I didn’t even know what the Beatles were about. I just heard the songs and learnt them by heart. But I was determined to find out what they were singing. That was the main motivation for a 14-year-old boy to learn the language."

Learning materials were hard to come by in Hanoi. In the absence of text books, Dang relied on his daily purchase of sticky rice, which came wrapped in a page from an English-language magazine.

It was after he graduated with a degree in linguistics and arts in 1993 that he first met Bill Magennis, who was stationed in the Hanoi office of Phillips Fox (now DLA Piper). The two struck up a friendship and Magennis became Dang’s mentor for the next 18 years.

It was 1994 when Magennis, who had just lost his translator and was looking to hire another, employed Dang, who then enrolled to study law. By the time he graduated in 1996, Magennis had taken him under his wing and encouraged him to go to Australia to obtain a common law qualification.

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Magennis compares discovering Dang to being like “an art promoter in the 19th century, stumbling across bits of Van Gogh".

“I remember the plastic sandals," Magennis says of their first meeting. “It quickly became clear that he was not just good at English but really rather gifted. He’s actually better than me; he’s a better writer."

Phillips Fox provided a scholarship for Dang to enrol at a law course at Bond University on the Gold Coast. He was 21, and it was the first time he had left Vietnam.

“I made the most of it, socially and academically," he says. “For the first two weeks it was, ‘God, what are they talking about?’ But at that age you get used to things very quickly. You’re 21 years old. The world is your oyster."

Magennis thought Dang had the potential to become a partner before he left, but when he called after just 12 weeks at Bond to say he had topped the contract law course, he knew for sure.

“You don’t just get on a plane and go and do contract law at a place like Bond and come first unless you’re a bit special," he says.

After graduating, Dang began an articled clerkship with Phillips Fox in Melbourne, was admitted to practice and won a coveted position as associate to Victorian Court of Appeal judge
Alex Chernov
, now Victoria’s governor.

Dang would brief Chernov on upcoming commercial or criminal matters on the court list and the two “would discuss them until midnight", he says.

“I spent a year with him," he says. “It was fantastic, the most amazing thing I’ve ever done in my life. You’re fully immersed in the law at the top level of legal analysis."

Chernov says Dang was “one of the hardest working people I’ve known, one of the most dedicated people to the issue and he was prepared to debate it with me at some length. Often I had the final say – he graciously accepted that."

Chernov recalls that when Dang finished his stint as associate, but had six months of a masters of law course left, the Immigration Department wouldn’t let him stay. “So I intervened, or interfered, and he did finish it." Dang then taught law at the National University of Singapore, where he took his parents to try to show them what had become of his life. But it was difficult for them to comprehend fully the scale of his achievements, given their relatively humble background. It was also the first time they had been overseas.

“My mother is a village teacher and my father was a retired soldier," he says. “It was impossible to share the experience because it was so different. But they knew I was doing OK and was not into drugs and things. That was enough for them."

Dang’s next challenge was to take on a doctorate at the University of Oxford, where he completed a thesis on the application of international law in contracts between 2005 and 2008. Yearning for a return to private practice, he accepted a position working for his old mentor, Magennis, who had recently left Phillips Fox to establish Allens’ office in Hanoi. Up to the time he was appointed to the partnership, Dang has specialised in both infrastructure advice and international arbitration.

“I’ve been involved in most of the big foreign-owned, foreign-financed infrastructure projects in Vietnam," he says. “Power plants, refineries and those things."

In 1999, he advised on a $1.5 billion gas project involving BP, and since then has advised on two refineries, the second an $8 billion project with investors from Vietnam, Japan and Kuwait. He is an adviser on Vietnamese arbitration and hears disputes as an arbitrator in Singapore.

When Allens announced its new partners, Dang told the Hanoi staff that “becoming a partner at a firm like Allens is every boy’s dream".

“But it is not so much my dream as Bill’s dream," he says. “I vividly remember, on one of my first days at work, he said, ‘One day I want you to sit in this chair. To work like me. And I’ll just come and visit.’

“My dream now is to see my Vietnamese fellows going down the same path and reaching the same point.

“You can’t return to the person who helped you gain the favour. That’s impossible. All you can do is pass it on."